cargo-zigbuild

Compile Cargo project with zig as linker for easier cross compiling.

Installation

cargo install cargo-zigbuild

You can also install it using pip which will also install ziglang automatically:

pip install cargo-zigbuild

We also provide a Docker image which has macOS SDK pre-installed in addition to cargo-zigbuild and Rust, for example to build for x86_64 macOS:

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/io -w /io messense/cargo-zigbuild \
  cargo zigbuild --release --target x86_64-apple-darwin

Usage

Install zig following the official documentation, on macOS, Windows and Linux you can also install zig from PyPI via pip3 install ziglang
Install Rust target via rustup, for example, rustup target add aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
Run cargo zigbuild, for example, cargo zigbuild --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

Specify glibc version

cargo zigbuild supports passing glibc version in --target option, for example, to compile for glibc 2.17 with the aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu target:

cargo zigbuild --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.2.17

Caveats

Currently only Linux, macOS and Windows gnu targets are supported, other target platforms can be added if you can make it work, pull requests are welcome.
If the --target argument is the same as the host target, for example when compiling from Linux x86_64 to Linux x86_64, Cargo by default also uses zig as linker for build dependencies like build scripts and proc-macros which might not work (See #4). You need to use the nightly Rust compiler then cargo-zigbuild will enable the unstable target-applies-to-host option automatically to make it work out of the box.
Only current Rust stable and nightly versions are regularly tested on CI, other versions may not work.

Known upstream zig issues:

zig cc: parse -target and -mcpu/-march/-mtune flags according to clang: Some Rust targets aren't recognized by zig cc, for example armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
glibc 2.27 or older: fcntl64 not found, but zig's glibc headers refer it

License